Helena Uambembe

Helena Uambembe, born in 1994 in Pomfret, South Africa, is an artist of Angolan descent whose work is heavily influenced by her heritage and experiences.

She obtained her Btech in 2018 from Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa. Uambembe won the David Koloane Award and completed a two-month residency at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg. She has exhibited at Art Basel Statement where she was awarded the Baloise Art Prize in 2022. She had her first institutional solo show at Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst MMK Frankfurt in 2023.

She is also one of the recipients of the 2025 Ars Viva Art Prize. With a unique artistic voice rooted in her personal experience and heritage, Helena Uambembe continues to explore and push the boundaries of contemporary art.

Recognised for her gifted, multidisciplinary practice, Helena Uambembe’s body of work incorporates a variety of media. Her practice makes use of installation, performance, printmaking and textiles. Whatever her choice of medium, Uambembe’s artworks serve as telling pieces that not only draw on her own life, but also seek to address the erasure of conflicts complicit in South Africa’s wars in Angola and Namibia. Confronting these erasures is poignant, especially when one considers that the legacies of these past conflicts can still be felt today.